Deborah at Help! The Faerie Folk Hid My Ancestors opts for thanking the people and places that helped her out in 2010, compiling a very useful list of resource links in the process.

Finally, if you haven’t already read Megan Smolenyak’s Helping Unclaimed Persons post at Huffington Post, check it out. Helping to link names and families to the nameless and alone is certainly a worthy New Year’s goal.

In Other News

Irish update: The Irish Times offers a Monday morning overview of the state of Irish archival research. When considering Irish records, it’s inevitable that the destructive year of 1922 springs to mind, but as reporter Steven Smyrl points out, historians, genealogists and archivists “have become adept at squeezing every last bit of information from the surviving records.”

Late but good: The extensive holdings of the archives of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston are profiled in this article out of Braintree, Mass. Read all about what’s there and what’s not.

Good idea: This letter to the editor is an interesting variation on the genealogy query technique. Of course, there’s no telling whether a newspaper editor would choose to run a genealogy query, but some would, and who knows, it might ring a bell somewhere.

A striking view: This is a bit OT, but I loved Faith Elizabeth Hough’s post on The Genealogy of Story. How interesting to think of (then read) who inspired your favorite authors, and who inspired them, and who inspired them…. and on into time.